Miguel Piernavieja del Pozo and the Spanish Recall of 1940
By Vera Kessler ·
Kept in the Security Service's PF Series files, the record of a Spanish spy in London shows how 'dissolute behaviour' became the excuse for a clumsy extraction.
Miguel Piernavieja del Pozo was a man whose only real talent was being useful as a delivery mechanism for lies. He spent the early years of the Second World War believing he was a sophisticated operative in the heart of the enemy's capital, while in reality, he was a monitored asset in a British game of mirrors.
What survives of this history is a catalogue description from the UK National Archives, a summary of a larger personal file that captures the brief, failed trajectory of a Spanish agent. The record identifies him as "Miguel PIERNAVIEJA DEL POZO, aliases POGO, POJO," and it traces his arrival in London in 1940 under the thin veil of a journalistic cover (KV 2/3851).
The Journalist Cover
In 1940, London was a city of sirens and blackouts, and the Security Service—the domestic intelligence agency responsible for counter-espionage—was not in the habit of ignoring foreign nationals arriving under vague professional credentials. Yet Pozo, a Spanish spy recruited by the German intelligence service, the espionage arm of the Nazi regime, was permitted to operate. The record states that Pozo "was used by the German intelligence service to contact the double-cross agent GW, a sub-agent of SNOW" (KV 2/3851).
GW, the double-agent at the center of this contact, was a man playing a dangerous game of loyalty, acting as a conduit for British disinformation while pretending to serve Berlin. He worked under SNOW, an agent whose specific identity and role are not detailed in the available record, but who functioned as the primary handler for the GW channel. The public record establishes that Pozo was quickly spotted by MI5, who assigned him the codename Pogo.
The pattern suggests that the Security Service did not merely tolerate Pozo; they curated his presence. A Spanish national arriving as a journalist during the height of the Blitz is not a cover—it is a signal. By allowing Pozo to remain, MI5 ensured that the German intelligence service had a reliable, if unwitting, postman to deliver the specific narrative the British wanted Berlin to believe. Pozo was not a threat to be neutralized; he was a utility to be maintained.
The Hierarchy of Deception
To understand Pozo's place in the machinery of the Double-Cross System, one must look at the names that surround him in the archives. In the same series of files, the Security Service tracked agents of a different caliber. There is Juan Pujol Garcia, known as Garbo, a Spanish citizen and celebrated MI5 double agent who created an entire phantom network of spies to deceive the Germans about the location of the D-Day landings (KV 2/4210). There is Dusko Popov, codenamed Tricycle, a Yugoslav-born agent recruited by the Abwehr who turned to the British and provided critical intelligence on German intentions (KV 2/853).
Pozo shares a nationality with Pujol Garcia, but the two operated in different stratospheres of espionage. Where Pujol Garcia was an architect of strategic deception, Pozo was a "conduit" (KV 2/3851). The desk's reading is that Pozo was a low-value cut-out, a man hired for his passport and his willingness to travel, designed to provide the Germans with plausible deniability. If Pozo were captured, he could be burned without compromising the higher-level architecture of the German network. He was the expendable layer of the operation.
The irony of Pozo's position is that while he believed he was the bridge between the Reich and its assets in London, he was actually the leash by which the Security Service led the German intelligence service. Every report he carried, every meeting he arranged with GW, was a choreographed event. He was not a spy so much as he was a piece of hardware in a British transmission line.
Dissolute Behaviour
The end of Pozo's London tenure came not through an arrest or a formal exposure, but through a recall. The record notes that Pozo's "dissolute behaviour led to his being recalled by the Spanish government" (KV 2/3851).
In the sterile language of intelligence files, "dissolute behaviour" usually refers to gambling, drinking, or sexual indiscretions—the kind of personal instability that makes an agent a liability. However, the Spanish government, the administration of Francisco Franco, was not in the business of protecting the moral purity of its expatriates during a total war. The sudden decision to extract an asset from a critical theater of operations suggests a motivation far more urgent than a lapse in etiquette.
If the shape of this file is what it appears to be, "dissolute behaviour" is a sanitized euphemism for an operational failure. The pattern suggests that the German intelligence service realized Pozo had been compromised—or that the Spanish government, acting as a cleaning service for their German allies, stepped in to prevent his inevitable capture. By recalling him for "behaviour," Spain provided a diplomatic cover for a security extraction, allowing Pozo to leave London without admitting that the German channel to GW had been transparent to the British from the start.
The Cleaning Service
This recall reveals a triangulation between London, Berlin, and Madrid that the record only hints at. The Spanish government did not act out of a sudden concern for Pozo's character; they acted as a buffer. By removing Pozo, they closed a leaking valve before the Security Service could squeeze it for more information than the Germans were willing to lose.
The desk's reading is that the withheld portions of the PF Series files—the gaps between the catalogue summary and the actual pages—contain the post-mortem of Pozo's loyalty. The Security Service likely watched the recall with amusement, knowing that by removing Pozo, the Germans were admitting defeat on that specific channel. The British had already extracted the value they needed from the Pogo conduit; they had no reason to stop the Spanish from taking their failure home.
What the record shows is the lifecycle of a disposable asset. Pozo arrived with a fake profession, operated under a known watch, and left under a fake excuse. He was a man who existed in the margins of the Great Game, a footnote to the brilliance of agents like Garbo. He paid for his vanity with his reputation, leaving behind a file that describes him not as a patriot or a professional, but as a man whose only lasting contribution to history was being too "dissolute" to keep his seat at the table.